Say someone is designing the routing of a fiber optic network, they will be able to couple their design with a street view from Google to adjust the course of the fiber to avoid running across a parking lot or through a house. That same view will be accessible from the field on Android-powered smartphones and tablets, allowing revisions to be made on the fly—and ideally before the expensive business of sending trucks and digging holes commences.

Those simple features, available for some time to consumers, will be a great leap forward in the industrial sector, Friehauf says, and he imagines how Google could help push it even further for this new set of users. “What about 3-D visualizations, so instead of Street View, we started getting below the street and above it?” he says. The next industrial version of Google Maps could display all the electric lines and pipe systems running below ground and then show how they branch out and terminate inside houses and buildings.